Voice-based customer service is common in today's commercial practice. In a typical voice-based customer service process, a customer dials a customer service number provided by a merchant. The customer is normally greeted by pre-recorded voice instructions and provided with a selection of services by means of a voice menu. This form of customer service, however, has many problems. First, in order for the merchant to provide more comprehensive services, the voice menu usually includes many options or includes long explanations. Since the customer can only receive the relevant menu information in the form of voices and the customer normally cannot remember too much information, what happened frequently is that the customer has to replay the current voice menu in order to recall the menu items that have just been heard, thus increasing the complexity of the operation and easily making the subscriber feel uncomfortable. Second, the order or arrangement of these menu items are designed by the merchant unilaterally, and the arrangement of these menu item are usually fixed and would not adapted to different customers. Therefore, it is possible that the menu item corresponding to the service requested by the customer is arranged as the last item of all the menu items provided by the merchant. Because the customer usually does not know the arrangement of the menu items until he/she finishes listening to the whole menu, the customer has to spend a long time to listen to other menu items or voice descriptions that are unnecessary and redundant. Moreover, due to the inflexible design of the voice menu, when a menu item corresponding to the service requested by the customer is buried deep in layers of selections, the customer has to repeat the same lengthy operation in order to reach the requested menu item every time he/she dials a voice service number, even when the customer has already dialed such service number many times before and the customer requests the same service every time he/she dials such service number.
In view of above shortcomings, it's desirable to provide a more convenient and more efficient solution for facilitating the interaction and communication between the customer and the merchant.